FairBnB offers an online booking platform for accommodation. What sets them apart from their competition is that they stand for collective ownership, democratic governance, social sustainability and transparency. FairBnB wants to offer; “a community-centred alternative that prioritizes people over profit and facilitates authentic, sustainable and intimate travel experiences. We are creating an online platform that allows hosts and guests to connect for meaningful travel and cultural exchange, while minimizing the cost to communities”.

But how can you offer an authentic, sustainable and intimate experience? What role can the FairBnB’s hosts play to ensure that a neighbourhood like Amsterdam Noord sees the benefit of having tourists in the area?

The Urban Leisure and Tourism Lab will conduct a research that will lead to a set of guidelines that will stimulate hosts to offer an authentic, sustainable, intimate and local experience, that will have a positive impact on the neighbourhood of Amsterdam Noord.

To come to these guidelines local experts that know the neighbourhood and its inhabitants will be interviewed. Furthermore, in-depth interviews will be conducted with tourism experts. Workshops will be organised at the Student Conference Sustainable Tourism in Diemen and at the Responsible Travel minor in Haarlem, at which fourth year students can provide input. In addition, a dialog with local inhabitants and entrepreneurs will be organised regarding tourism in Amsterdam Noord and the role that FairBnB.

IJ-Amaze is aimed at creating a platform for meetings between visitors and the local people of Amsterdam-Noord. IJ-Amaze is an inclusive and sustainable tourist product in which co-creation, authenticity and meaningful contact plays a major role. The product is being created and fully cared for by residents of Amsterdam-Noord. Four themes (culture, active, social or creative) are the guiding principle for the residents to tell their ‘Noorderlingen’ stories about how it was, how it is, and how it will be in the future with Amsterdam-Noord and it’s inhabitants. Visitors who use IJ-amaze are matched with a program appropriate to their interest.

A student project group of the Inholland University of Applied Sciences developed an initial concept for the IJ-Amaze project in a design assignment. Given the potential of the project, the Urban Leisure & Tourism Lab of the Inholland University, which focuses on the creation of inclusive and sustainable meeting places in Amsterdam-Noord, decided to do more research into the extent to which there is a need for ownership among residents of Noord, regarding the tourist developments in their neighborhood. This will be done by actual testing the prototype of IJ-amaze. The research and testing will be carried out as a bachelor thesis.
The project fits into the goal of spreading the tourist stream.

One of the main three themes of the UL&T Lab is social inclusion.
This is a concept found reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the World Leisure Organisation, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Dutch Creative Industries (CLICKNL), the Amsterdam City Council and consequently in the Creative Business Domain at the Inholland University of Applied Sciences.

Unsurprisingly there are myriad definitions. As a reflective educational institute, we are inspired by the idea of inclusion as a process rather than a static state:
‘It might therefore be necessary to conceive and implement inclusion as a process that brings into question all aspects of the social, institutional and political systems. A dynamic and changeable process, always in progress…with the purpose of giving everyone a sense of belonging through a process of mutual recognition, where the individual reasons, relationships and lives are connected with a common development path.’ (Carpani 2018)

Our approach is to link the theme of inclusion to macro societal developments whilst exploring and raising awareness of the real experiences of in/exclusion at intimate, personal, micro level within the context of changing neighbourhoods. To quote one of our colleagues, we relish complex ‘wicked problems’!

Since we are a University of Applied Sciences, our task is to weave theory with practice so phase one of this research has been to carry out an analysis of literature & existing good practice, in order to create a design toolbox for our creative industries students. This will provide them with both a clear foundation and practical tools throughout their design research projects, many of which are located in the Dutch metropolis.

As from September 2018, we have entered phase two, in which we prototype the toolbox with our Leisure and Tourism Management students in Amsterdam. In October, we will explore inclusion from a new perspective and take the toolbox to the Taragalte music festival in the Moroccan Sahara. Whilst prototyping continues in Amsterdam throughout the winter, we will also test it in Tangier in December. In the spring, cultural management students from DMU, our Leicester Erasmus partner, will be visiting us for their annual fieldtrip and with their input we will continue to make the toolbox more robust.

By the end of the current academic year, we aim to have entered phase three, with a printed analogue toolbox plus a digital platform for continually sharing new ideas and fine-tuning both our philosophy and practice.

Inholland has been developing events in Amsterdam Noord for several years, with the aim of increasing cooperation and interaction in the neighborhood. With the help of a Social Return on Investment (SROI) tool we want to map the social return of events in the neighborhood.

Based on the theoretical exploration and the previously developed toolboxes for NGOs, we have created a first prototype of a Guide & Toolkit: ‘Measuring the impact of urban social events’.

The Guide contains the findings from the theoretical exploration of placemaking, inclusiveness, sustainability and events.

The toolkit follows the five main steps of the SROI method:

Objective

Stakeholders analysis

Measuring the results - preparation

Verifying and valuing the impact

Monitor and report

Students of the Leister Castle Business School are currently testing this toolkit. We expect their feedback in early September and we will process this in the toolbox.

An initial inventory among stakeholders in Amsterdam Noord shows that there is a lot of interest in this toolbox. Both from the event organizers and from the municipality. In consultation with them and with the help of students, we will plan and execute follow-up research.